Of C.L.R. James

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Election fatigue. It’s a thing people enjoy jokingly
discussing as the election winds down: the ways that we’ve been made to suffer
through a horrible, seemingly endless spectacle, the general feeling that we
just want it to be over. We have rituals, therapeutic utterances, regimes of
ironic self-care. “Here’s a video of a dog surfing on a duck that is also
vaping to help you get through the election.” “Wake me up in [X unit of time]
when the election is over.” Enough with the election already—enough with
politics for a while. Let cat gifs just be cat gifs, not small inoculations of
ordinariness against the extraordinary time of the election cycle.

So, everyone is tired. Really fucking tired. And it is in
this national exhaustion with the election—which, for much of the nation, is an
exhaustion with politics as such—that we can detect the degrading impact of
electoral seasonality on non-electoral political movements. You will of course
recall hearing, and hearing routinely, a liberal-progressive voting friend say
something like, “Voting takes [X small unit of time]. Do it, then get back out
there, organizing for other things.” The slogan wants to say that voting is
just one item in a possible political repertoire; we shouldn’t over-emphasize
it, one way or another, but we should still do it, if only because it doesn’t
inhibit our ability to do other political things.

It is an obviously incorrect statement.

We know that for many people voting doesn’t take a small
amount of time at all. There’s the problem of getting proper ID, registering,
finding a polling place, traveling there, and so on.

We know, furthermore, that people are investing more and
more time into learning things about candidates. The actual content of that
information might be dubious, wrong, or just whacky, but even the dude who
thinks HRC is a lizard person is taking time to think about voting.

Most importantly, what we now know through this election
cycle, in our feelings of fatigue and exhaustion, is that voting does not take
time as a discrete unit: X minutes at the polling place, X hours or days sitting
with debates and press releases and a horde of pundits and their takes. The
election takes time, and takes it as such; it appropriates social time, and
refashions it according to its bizarre rhythms. These rhythms have nothing to
do with the ordinary time of the social. (I’ve never heard anyone in
non-electoral years invest the worst day of the second worst month with any
kind of value.) It’s an alien time that superimposes itself, and then subsumes,
everydayness—the quotidian time of the social, with all its quotidian
deprivations and depletions that mobilize movements.

Fatigue is the experience of being compelled to be present
to a world despite your sense that it is depleting your ability to move within
it. To describe our collective relation to the election as one of fatigue is to
concede the foundational heteronomy that conditions our relationship to the
parliamentary state. We might want to sleep in until the election is over—but we
can’t. We have to go about our lives. And the election insinuates itself into
all aspects of waking life, it’s hard to shut out or shut off, even with
gestures of intense negativity, and it promises to come back, ever 2 years,
every 4 years, and many call this mass suffering democracy. To an extent, then,
the generalized feeling of fatigue marks an ordinary, pop-anarchistic desire to
negate State time. We’re literally tired of it.

That’s cool, but I have a simple worry, which is obvious
from everything I’ve written: given the dominance of electoral politics in the
U.S. social imaginary, for many people electoral politics are more or less
collapsible into politics as such. As voting comes to appropriate social time,
the electoral appropriates the political at the level of lived feeling. Election
fatigue becomes politics fatigue, including even those broad genres of
political mobilizing that have little to do with electoral politics. It becomes
hard to imagine the other political things that lib-progressives imagine they’ll
be doing just after they do that temporally insignificant thing of voting, given
that they and everyone else are just so fucking tired. Put in the form of a
thought experiment: Can you imagine a less propitious day for the eruption of a
social movement than the second Tuesday of November?

Elections are devices by which states seasonally re-appropriate
political being from the plebs, attempting to de-compose non-statist political movements
into the drama of king-making. Just think of the sheer amount of work the state
and its deputized apparatuses put in to getting people to do what is supposed
to be at once (and impossibly) a right and a privilege. In this election
season, this appropriation is taking place to the extent that we’ve become
affectively aware of the operation. Feeling fatigued, we all want to say, “To
hell with politics, take it away, technocrats!”—even as we feel like we can’t,
because this election is too important or whatever. (Has there ever been an
election that didn’t bill itself as the most important for a given population
at the time?) Voters will vote, and then hasten to sleep. Shit’s been
exhausting; it’ll be good to go back to ordinary time.

Anyone who has hashtagged NoDAPL or BLM should know that
there is no ordinary time on the horizon. Anyone who has hashtagged NoDAPL or
BLM should know that primary political antagonisms of our day engage temporalities
utterly out of sync with the electoral temporalizations of the liberal state. It
is in the horizon of these centuries-long struggles, carried out by indefatigable
oppressed peoples, that we should think the meaning, and function, of election-induced
politics fatigue.

Friday, June 3, 2016

The most commonly cited
aspect of Weber’s definition of the state is that it possesses a monopoly on
the legitimate use of force. The accent of the phrase falls on “legitimate.”
Obviously, private individuals continue to use physical force in various ways;
the point is that such force lacks legitimacy. To use force without the
authorization of the state is criminal.

But Weber doesn’t talk about
the legitimate use of force as something simply and once-and-for-all secured to
the state. He writes, rather, of “The claim of the modern state to monopolize
the use of force”—a phrasing that introjects a lot more uncertainty into the
issue. A claim is just a claim; it is as good as one’s ability to enforce it.
He elsewhere writes that the state “lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate
physical violence within a certain territory.” Here, the tense of claims making
is open, iterative; the state is only a state to the extent that it
continuously lays claim to this monopoly. It lays claim to this monopolized
violence by enacting its violence.

There’s an important
flipside to all of this, though: the state’s claim to the monopoly of
legitimate violence functions through an expropriation
of violence from non-state actors. It is as a result of this expropriation that
violence becomes riven by a binary—legitimate and illegitimate—that did not
preexist this process. The idea that non-state actors might commit political
violence becomes almost a contradiction in terms; only the polity, as the
state, can legitimately commit such violence. Only the state can have its
violence modified by the adjective “political.” Moreover, this process of
expropriation is just as iterative and ongoing as the state’s constant claim to
its monopoly. The hyper-violent state operates by depriving its subjects of
their capacity for political violence. It works to render such a capacity for
violence unthinkable.

The state’s ongoing
expropriation of subjects’ capacity for political violence: this process is
important to keep in mind when we consider the “violence” that occurred at the
Trump rally in San Jose. The line taken by liberals has been predictable.
Jamelle Bouie, for instance, tweeted, “Nothing good comes from political
violence, period.” Obviously, the claim is falsifiable by many, many historical
examples. Not so obviously, the violence complained of here is less the use of
physical objects or fist fighting and more the plebian violation of the
administered normal. It’s basically a deontological argument masked as a
consequentialist one.

I’m more interested in a
line I’ve heard from people on the left. It goes something like this: Violence like this is probably
inefficacious. Yet, if you insist on the possibility of using some form of
physical violence as necessary for antifascist political work, your level of
violence is laughably inadequate to the threat you claim to be responding to.
The implication of such a line is that a) the object we’re attacking isn’t
actually fascism, or we would be attacking with greater vehemence, b) most of
the political violence we’ve seen (regardless of whether it should be called
violence) amounts to enactments of manarchist fantasies detached from concrete political
realities and c) stop doing this shit.

It’s pretty interesting,
really. I think we have broad swaths of the U.S. left that are not normatively
anti-violence but who also would be reluctant to accept that any single
instance of political violence—a smashed window, a thrown egg—has any positive
effect. From this perspective, the proof of the pudding comes in the scalable
effects of any single instance of political violence: a thrown egg didn’t
defeat fascism, so throwing the egg was at best an ineffectual gesture. A
smashed window didn’t end capitalism. The point always boils down to the
obvious: we are not at a revolutionary conjuncture in which such acts might
turn into anything. (The implication for many is that we never will be.)

This is why turning to
Weber, and his narrative of the state’s ongoing expropriation of political
violence from ordinary people, is important. Very simply, we’ve been made dumb
about violence. Over the past century, the massive expansion of what counts as
“violence”— in the liberal, Chris Hedges, finger-wagging sense—is staggering.
The definition of violence is itself a very important political weapon: such
definitions encode and reproduce the value-relations of our world. Liberals
clutch pearls over smashed glass; the enforced displacement of humans called
gentrification, not so much. More to my point, the expansion of the term’s
ambit inversely correlates to its expropriation from the political repertoire of
ordinary, non-state actors. A large part of this expropriation of violence has
been bound up with the material recomposition of classes and the state through
the twentieth century. The unions have been gutted that could (and did) more or
less wage small wars against state-backed companies; meanwhile, police forces
have been augmented in all the ways we know about. A significant part of this
expropriation of violence also registers at the level of ideology and the
formation of a collective corporeal habitus. We’ve been trained to feel like
our bodies, and our modes of extending them, cannot have effects on the
political and economic structures that require dismantling. Fascism, after all,
didn’t vanish with that thrown egg.

Consequentialist approaches
to small acts of political violence—if violence is even the proper term—are
complicit with the state’s expropriation of violence to the extent that they
induce a feeling that our bodies are always already incapacitated to impact the
political, to violate its administered normal. The idea that political violence
only makes sense in conditions of a full-blown revolutionary conjuncture
obfuscates the fact that re-appropriating political violence from the state is
a necessary condition for anything like a revolution to occur. This process of
re-appropriation takes time, and is intimately bound up with the revolutionary
process. These small acts are moments of collective self-pedagogy where subjects learn, slowly and haltingly but truly, what our bodies can do, and
what they can do without the state-form. They are an organic part of the
process of communizing the monopolized violence of the state and its
racist-fascoid fanboys.

Fascism didn't vanish with that thrown egg, but it will never have vanished if it hadn't been thrown.

Thursday, December 3, 2015

I always think about the
first line of Rilke’s first elegy when I think about what comes first in poetic
address because it stages the primal fact of any address: It is probable that
no one is listening, that no one can hear what you would want heard. All lyric
address begins in the phatic mode, as a query, “Hey! Hey?” But—and this is
second originary fact of lyric address—the poem must proceed as if no one is in
fact listening, as if no one is there, as if the addressee won’t and can’t
respond. The non-response of the one whom the speaker wishes to respond opens
the space of the poem; it creates the realm of privacy in which the speaker
encounters subjectivity as deprivation. This deprivation isn’t sad, though. Or,
if it is, sadness is not the worst one risks experiencing by opening one’s
mouth and shouting to the angels. There’s something worse—and that is,
precisely, to have been heard, to have been made intimate to the one whom one
addresses. What if the angels heard Rilke’s speaker, and responded? Terror
would follow, he claims:

“…and even if one of them
pressed me

suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed

in that overwhelming
existence. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror,
which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because
it serenely disdains

to annihilate us. Every
angel is terrifying.”

Lyric is the condition of
where the negation of a desire precedes its articulation, where not wanting to
be heard incites one’s very act of address.

I’ve been thinking about
these lines of Rilke since I encountered liberal-oriented critiques of
people—presidential candidates, sure, but ordinary folks too—who responded to
the San Bernardino shooting by tweeting out their “thoughts and prayers.” Now
is not the time for prayers, the commentary goes; prayer does nothing. What we
need is real action, or at least a commitment to real action. Not this
supernatural nonsense whose sole purpose is to assuage the troubled consciences
of a Christian Right whose love of guns prevents real action from being taken.
And on. And on. It’s even got a couple of hashtags: #thoughtsandprayers and
#ThoughtsAndPrayersAreNotEnough.

What immediately struck me
about this prayer-trolling is the functional indistinction between prayers to
an absent god and randomly shouting shit on a Twitter hashtag. Unless you are
@’ing a bud bound to respond, almost any tweet you write is necessarily
oriented toward a non-present superaddressee, toward the possibility that
someone might be listening even when there is no empirical proof that anyone in
fact is. Both prayer and social media participate in the lyric structure of
address that Rilke limns when he begins by asking if anyone is listening at
all.

Prayer bares the device of any
social media platform that desires political efficacy. We want to imagine
social media as a new instrument in the repertoire of participatory democracy,
as a new means for establishing broad consent and pressuring state officials to
norm their actions with out represented desires. Our secular liberals would
probably be okay if our prayerful tweeters simply shifted addressees and made
demands upon Obama instead of supplicating God. But such a shift in addressee would
not shift the structure of address. Neither God nor the state is listening;
neither will respond. Even if a response arrives, there is no secure connection
between public representation of its desires and state action, no conduit that
converts that force of the former into a force that acts upon the latter. Any
connection between what we say to the state and what the state does is the
effect of a miraculous, magical causality. To engage in or with the public is
always to be praying.

On one side, then, the
theological mystifiers; on the other, the humanist demystifiers. God and the
State. What links these two positions is their profound incapacity to think
action beyond making representations to a superaddressee. Instead of thinking
about concrete modes in which we might act to de-pathologize the social, we
call upon a transcendent being who will never adequately respond to
#DoSomething. Anything! Just give us a sign that you’re real, Obama.

But what if the state
listens? When if angels hear our cries and act? Every angel is terrifying, Rilke
warns, and sometimes to be heard is to be complicit in one’s own annihilation.
What Rilke describes as an aesthetic terror might, in the realm of the
political, name an experience of what the state does once it responds to our
prayer that it do something, anything. Once it holds us close and tell us, yes,
it will #DoSomething for us. The angelic terror of having-been-heard echoes
through Iraq, through Afghanistan, through every drone strike, through the
sighs or cries of every person subjected to hours of intensified searching at
borders, through the affectless data plucked by the NSA and the rest. We wanted
the state to do something; it did. Great job. It might be safer to make no
demands, to simply pray, when every act by which the state commits itself to
doing something becomes an alibi for doing something worse.

Today’s politics of terror
are founded by a terror of politics. We pray for angels to act, even if in
acting angels become demons, because action for us and by us, undertaken in our
own name, is more or less unthinkable. The scale of action, the complexity of problems,
the simple fact of power differentials…these are indeed big problems. Huge. And
they require a lot of tactical and strategic thinking, and this always normed
by political practice. True political terror today comes from knowing that
to-hand formations of the political cannot help us, while also knowing that
there are no to-hand ways by which we might help ourselves. Anarchism begins with
the terrifying knowledge that there’s no transcendent structure, God or State,
who might help us, and with the equally terrifying knowledge that any such
structure will be worse than none at all.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

When going to school looks not a little like
being in a prison, we're no longer talking about a subject's itinerary through
discrete times and spaces—the narrative geography wherein a student, routed
through a school that can only fail her, finds herself pushed into juvenile or
adult criminal justice systems. The rigidity of disciplinarity
in the post-public public school system intimates the tendential identity of
the prison-function and the school-function. When a teacher calls an
administrator who calls a cop who then brutalizes a student for failing to move
from her seat when ordered, neither students nor observers need schooling in
Althusser or Foucault to see the school operating as a prison.

All the same, school and prison’s tendency
toward an identity of function can be hard to see. First, it is only emergent, a
tendency, a possible future that nonetheless enacts itself in the present and
points us toward what is in the process of becoming. To read this process of
becoming is not the same as declaring an accomplished identity. Indeed, to say today
“the school is a prison” is also to compute with the fact that it also is not a prison, not really, not yet. In
describing a tendential identity, then, one always risks a kind of
overdramatization, the inflation of an instance into a sign of things to come.

Second, this emergent identity is masked by the
entrenched persistence of signifiers—and not a little sentiment, too. We
continue to call “schools” institutions that are functionally indifferent to
the task of fostering the creative, intellectual, and affective capacities of
those whom we continue to call “students.” We continue to call “teachers” those
people whose skills and good intentions are perverted by an apparatus and a
world that doesn’t care about anyone’s intentions. And these signifiers are so
sticky because they are so affectively saturated. We all have a favorite
teacher, and few of us are prepared to acknowledge that we were bonding to someone
who unwittingly substitutes for a cop. And then plenty of folks on the left are
wary of critiquing school and schooling today for fear of sounding like a Milton
Friedman acolyte. Let’s just remember that it is utterly possible for two
opposed political orientations to have a critique of a shared object; that
doesn’t mean they have a shared critique. One can mark the tendential identity
of schools and prisons and (as I do) still support teachers unions—if only to
block and roll back the recoding of schools by the police function.

The idea of the school-to-prison pipeline gets
around these barriers through dissociation. The to situates the students in a cartography of linked but discrete
spaces, which enables us to cognitively and affectively sunder school from prison. The case of the phrase is
accusative, but the critical disposition and political fantasy it sustains is in the ablative. And
so it becomes harder to see the prison in the school.

My recourse to grammar might seem pedantic, but
it’s not. Slogans are the residues of past struggles and the seeds of new ones.
They travel so well because they are so economic in their language. And they
are so powerful because they teach so quickly. (Try to recall the first time
you heard the phrase “school-to-prison pipeline.” I actually can’t, because I
can’t imagine not knowing it, the way it let me rethink the institutional
fabric of the world. That’s powerful teaching, and all in just four words.) In
a movement phrase, every word counts, every word is made out of and remakes a
movement’s orientation toward the world.

I wouldn’t dream of trying to coin a new
slogan, but we need a different vocabulary—one that, in terms of grammar, opts
for the conjunction over the preposition. Where the preposition posits discrete
time-spaces, the logic of the conjunction allows us to see the overlapping but
non-identical functioning of these two institutions and their rationalities.
Non-identity matters: after all, the teacher called an administrator who called
a cop; the teacher and administrator could not beat the student on their own
authority. What that moment revealed was neither a school-to-prison pipeline
nor the achieved identity of the two. Rather, that moment displayed school and prison operating in the same
time-space as an articulated assemblage. Cop and teacher, hand in hand.

It also revealed, I think, the way that Spring
Valley High School is situated in a broader social terrain where school
functions as a prison—that is, where
the labor of human cultivation is subordinated to simple and authoritarian
order maintenance. In the school-as-prison, the aim and activity of pedagogy is
repurposed to conform to the aims of the police. To be sure, schools have
always worked to produce orderly subjects, but such ordered subjectivities were
produced through the pedagogical
process itself. (Just think of everything implied in the act of raising one’s
hand.) Now, police are taking over the application of discipline in schools,
and teachers and legislators are handing it over to them. Niya Kenny, the
student who filmed the event, was arrested for “disturbing
school,” an honest to Jesus law
that legislators recently attempted to amend
to increase fines from one to two thousand dollars and jail time from ninety
days to one year. (Thanks to Ed Kazarian for sharing the “disturbing school”
link.) This handoff in disciplinarity marks less a differentiation of function
between cops and teachers and more a willed subordination of pedagogical space
to the police. Think about this absurdity: a student refusing to leave her seat
sparks an event that compels the Richland County Sheriff to
fly back from the cop conference in Chicago like a sovereign returning to
his troubled land. In this school-as-prison arrangement, cops rule.

School and prison, school as prison, yes. But
the most troubling possibility, I think, is school or prison. By using this locution, I don’t intend to invoke the
uplift narrative that posits education as a means of avoiding criminality or,
really, criminalization—a narrative that the “school-to-prison pipeline”
concept has already undone. The or of
my “school or prison” marks not a choice between alternatives but an identity produced
through the indifferent interchangeability of functions. It is sort of like the
sive in Spinoza’s “Deus sive natura.”
It would sound like this: “School or prison—whatever, what’s the difference.” The
school is rapidly and intensively being inscribed as an institution in the
state’s carceral network; the logics of policing are overwriting the ideal
logics of pedagogy. The racialized poor of the U.S. are sent to school to learn
how to do time in prison, and the effectiveness of this pedagogy indicates the tendential interchangeability of school
and jail.

The minimal demand to combat this tendency is
very simple: No cops at school. Neither police nor private security guards
should ever be involved in administering ordinary classroom discipline. No
teacher or administrator should ever have the thought that this could be a good
idea or a necessary thing. These are pretty easy fixes, because incredibly
concrete. But minimal demands are just that—minimal—and the prison-function of
the school is not limited to the fact that cops are on campus. To think beyond
the minimal requires some account, perhaps, of the multiple systemic forces
that overdetermine the becoming-prison of the school. But the question is not
simply one of knowledge, of planning, of finding the best systemic points at
which to undo the carceralization of the classroom. It is also one of
dispositions and orientations and the creation of new imaginings of the world.
I’m thinking of the student who was beaten in South Carolina. By media
accounts, the student wasn’t participating in class but also refused to leave
it. Maybe she doesn’t like the subject, maybe she didn’t like the pedagogical
mode, maybe she was just tired and having a bad day, maybe she just hates
school. But her refusal to participate in a given pedagogical arrangement
interacts dynamically with her refusal to leave the scene of learning; indeed,
we might say she was beaten because her refusals to participate and to leave
staged the difference between the learning she wanted and the schooling she
got. The cop, then, was not simply enforcing order but reproducing a
pedagogical norm: You will learn this subject in this way and not express
dissatisfaction with this fact. This command links pedagogical modes across
varied institutional terrains, from the underfunded public schools to the neoliberal
charters to, indeed, my own classroom, probably, alas. Getting cops out of
schools will be meaningless if a post-police pedagogy is unimaginable; the cop
will always be invited back in and, indeed, will never have left. What I want,
then, is to imagine the time, place, and form of encounter whose possibility is
conjured in the student’s refusal to participate and in her refusal to leave—a
world of learning otherwise where desiring alternatives won’t get you clubbed
by a cop.

Kristol is, of course,
citing the opening of Marx’s 18th Brumaire. Let’s quote it in full:

Hegel remarks somewhere that
all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He
forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière
for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the
Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew in place of the Uncle. And the same
caricature occurs in the circumstances surrounding the second edition of the
Eighteenth Brumaire!

We’ve been fighting a
second-edition Civil War for some time now—since the electoral season that led
to Obama’s first term. I've called it antebellism. It’s tiring and tiresome. The primary problematic effect
of mobilization around the Confederate flag in South Carolina has been to
displace concerns to take down white supremacist organizing into the symbolic
field of the Civil War. (Of course, I’m happy it’s not flying, but we’re
talking effects here, not moral norms.) In this regard, Kristol’s citation of
Marx is telling. White supremacists and their mainstream allies have undertaken
a discursive operation that attempts to shunt the possibility of a world-historical
tragedy—a robust, decisive encounter between competing nomoi, a decisive
encounter between the racists and the anti-racists—into something farcical, a
re-enactment of the Civil War undertaken entirely through cultural symbolics.
Kristol wants this farce. It’s far
better than a material challenge to white supremacy, racial capitalism, and the
racial state.

For anti-racists, the
solution is to not get entrapped in this symbolic field—although this is hard.
In the next paragraph of the 18th Brumaire, Marx writes

The tradition of the dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when
they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and
their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet
exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up
the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans and
costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in this venerable
disguise and borrowed language. Luther put on the mask of the apostle Paul; the
Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the
Roman empire; and the revolution of 1848 knew no better than to parody at some
points 1789 and at others the revolutionary traditions of 1793-5.

Here, Marx encourages us to
think symbolic belatedness as an index of a movement’s political and social
weakness in the time of its unfolding. It looks back because it possesses no
idiom of itself to address the composition of the present—or the future. White
supremacists present their politics indirectly, in the garb of future’s past,
because the future of a white politics is the undoing of any futurity, the
dissolution of the world. A fully whitened world would radiate disaster
triumphant, and so the content needs to hide in ambiguous or illegible
phrasing. A Confederate flag is obviously nostalgia for slavery—but no, it’s
heritage! Hitler can’t be heiled without a numerical transcription of the
alphabet. And most white nationalists, in their public remarks, deploy the
idiom of liberal multiculturalism in order to pose whiteness as just any other
political-racial-cultural identity. Political whiteness knows it can’t be
present in its presence. To be sure, symbolic weakness does not equate to
political inefficacy or an incapacity for outrageous violence; moreover, the
order of the world remains white supremacist regardless of the political
strength of white-supremacist movements. The point here, I think, is that the
cultural-symbolic remains a safe space for white supremacists in public because
it is the point at which politics can be articulated that otherwise can’t be,
and in polysemous, unstable ways that refuse—at least notionally—fixity.
Heritage, not racism.

White supremacy presents
itself through “world-historical necromancy,” in other words, because it can’t
offer a vision of the present or the future that most of the world would want.
This is not to say, of course, that an anti-racist, non-anti-black world is a
vision of the present or the world that most of the world would want, either. I
do want to suggest, though, that we would do well to cede this past in our
quest to build an anti-racist future. Most of the past—especially if white
people, the state, and capitalism are involved—has very little to offer us,
anyhow. So let’s let it go. It’s a field where, at best, to win is to break
even. As Marx put it, as he attempts to call it quits with this necromancy, “The
social revolution…can only create its poetry from the future, not the past.” In
that claim I hear Fanon, whose poetry from the future seems to haunt Marx in the
past: “comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and
endeavor to create a new man [sic].”

Poiesis, not history. We need to dedicate time to writing pieces that will train people in practical anti-racist tactics for the present, pieces that will circulate with the speed and popularity that three dozen articles on the cultural symbolics of the Civil War do. We need to materially organize to develop new ways of thinking in order to create the new human. What if think-piece publishers gave space to this endeavor, instead of shadowboxing with history's poltergeists? When
we make our new world, the Confederate flags will burn, anyhow, and the
monuments of Confederate generals will topple, too.